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There is no dividing line between civilian and military in
Baghdad now. Almost every shell the Americans fire as they battle
towards the centre of the city, whatever it is aimed at, risks
killing or maiming innocent people.
Iraqi fighters have built sandbagged emplacements on street
corners, under highway flyovers, in half-built houses and in
wasteland beside main roads; artillery pieces and mobile
anti-aircraft missile launchers are tucked under trees in parks.
The Iraqi strategy is to force the Americans to fight for every
street.
Every battle here is likely to kill or injure civilians. At one
roundabout, Iraqi soldiers have dug in by the roadside with
machine guns and recoil-less rifles - anti-tank weapons of the
type that disabled an Abrams tank on a highway in Baghdad on
Saturday.
But this is a residential area: the road leading here is one of
Baghdad's main commercial streets, lined with restaurants and
shops. Down the side streets are family houses and villas with car
porches and orange trees in their walled gardens.
Osama Sabah al-Yemeni, a surgeon who is deputy director of the
Kindi hospital in Baghdad, knows the price of this urban warfare.
On Saturday, when US B-52 bombers blasted targets south-west of
Baghdad and an American armoured column pushed along a ring road
through the city's outer suburbs, his emergency department
admitted 120 casualties in three hours.
"It was the most terrible day I have seen in my
life," he said on Sunday outside the emergency entrance. Jets
roared unseen overhead and the blast of bombs or artillery fire
resounded from the south.
Minutes later, casualties started to arrive, a dozen in 30
minutes, brought in ambulances, private vehicles and the back
seats of traffic police cars, wheeled on battered trolleys into
the emergency department surrounded by doctors in blue smocks and
desperate relatives.
Some could have been irregular fighters: as doctors plastered a
bleeding wound in a barely conscious young man's abdomen and
squeezed fluid into an intravenous drip into his arm, two
broad-shouldered men in black T-shirts and red headdresses who
could have belonged to the Saddam Fedayeen guerrillas pressed
through the crowd to see what was happening to their friend.
But most were obviously civilians. Doctors wheeled in an
unconscious woman in a pink floral print dress. Blood trickled
down her leg. An elderly man in glasses held up a wrist pouring
blood to be bandaged. Police and paramedics hauled another elderly
man out of the back seat of a car and on to a trolley.
It is impossible to do more than guess at what the people of
Baghdad will think of the Americans, and of their own government,
after this suffering.
Many Iraqis are already suspicious of US motives for invading
their country and hostile to US support for Israel, whatever their
opinions of their own government. No matter what the outcome of
this war, families of dead and injured civilians may find it
difficult to forgive.
Financial Times
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